Improved partition trees for multi-class segmentation of remote sensing images

We propose a new binary partition tree (BPT)-based framework for multi-class segmentation of remote sensing images. In the literature, BPTs are typically computed in a bottom-up manner based on spectral similarities, then analyzed to extract image objects. When image objects exhibit a considerable internal spectral variability, it often happens that such objects are composed of several disjoint regions in the BPT, yielding errors in object extraction. We pose the multi-class segmentation problem as an energy minimization task and solve it by using BPTs. Our main contribution consists in introducing a new dissimilarity function for the tree construction, which combines both spectral discrepancies and supervised class-specific information to take into account the within-class spectral variability. The experimental validation proved that the proposed method constitutes a competitive alternative for object-based image classification.